


i saved up all my sunshine just to see you more clear

by millepertuis



Category: Leverage
Genre: Case Fic, Established Relationship, Multi, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 14:34:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14771495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/millepertuis/pseuds/millepertuis
Summary: Hardison had been tracking some stolen historical artefact nonstop for the last few weeks—the main problem being that as soon as it settled somewhere, it got stolen by someone else and the search had to start all over again.





	i saved up all my sunshine just to see you more clear

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kereia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kereia/gifts).



> title from Tegan & Sara's song _This Is Everything_

 

“I’m just saying,” Eliot said, leaving Hardison’s plate to cool off on the counter and stalking off to the home gym. “You can’t make it to dinner, you call. That’s just good fucking manners.”

“I know, I know, man, I’m sorry. Got a bit tied up.”

“I _cooked_ for you, man. I made _lasagna_ for you.”

“From scratch?”

“What do you think?”

“Oh, man,” Hardison said, properly regretful this time.

“Where are you, anyway?”

Parker was off pulling a small con on local government with Amy, but Hardison hadn’t moved from his computer all day. He’d been gone by the time Eliot had come back from running errands though, only leaving a ‘Back soon!’ note on the fridge.

“About that,” Hardison said.

All of Eliot’s alarm bells went off. His hand reflexively went up to touch his in-ear. “Where are you?”

“Look, don’t go making a fuss over nothing.”

“Alec—”

“It wasn’t supposed to take more than an hour to get in and out! But then—”

An actual alarm started sounding on Hardison’s side, loud and deafening.

“Yes,” Hardison said. “That.”

“Tell me where the fuck—”

“Chill out, I can still make it out, gimme a minute.”

“I keep you safe,” Eliot said, frozen still in the hallway of their home, miles away from where he needed to be. “That’s my job. Let me do my job.”

There was complete silence on the line for a fraction of a second. The alarm had stopped. Then: “Hey, Eliot. I promise it’s gonna be alright.”

Then: the line went dead.

 

Eliot called Parker.

 

“I’m in,” Eliot said, having found Hardison’s backdoor into the target company’s network, some 500 company specialized in nerdy shit. “I’m pulling up the info on security in the building Hardison’s in. What’s your ETA?”

“Two minutes away.”

“I should be the one going to get him.”

“I was closer,” Parker said, taking a turn—Parker taking a turn came with very distinctive, disturbing sounds. “And I need you there giving me intel and watching Hardison’s location.”

Eliot thumbed at the spot on his back his own tracker had gone in. Parker had insisted on holding his hand while Hardison stuck the giant needle of the syringe in him. “Just two cameras on the ground floor watching the entrance. Twenty guys clocked in right now, three hours and a half until the next scheduled shift.” He rattled off every relevant info he could find, pulling up the security guys’ résumés and histories to check training, medical histories, debts, anything that might come in useful. One guy had had surgery on his knee a couple years back; one guy knew Krav Maga. All of them had guns.

“Don’t engage if you can avoid it.”

“I know.” The car stopped.

“He’s still on the third floor. How do you want to get in?”

She took a minute to look at the plans and security measures he’d sent to her phone. “There’s a park behind the building, no one there at this hour. Climb up on this side, cut a hole into the window of the north-east corner office, get in. You’ll monitor those guys’ radios—”

“Tell you when they’re close. You can’t just climb up a building, do you even have your material with you?”

“What do you think?”

“He’s got two guys in the room with him, two guys guarding the door,” he told her as she suited up.

“I’ll try to draw them off.”

“How? If they hear or see anything, they’re gonna radio some of the other guys, not go themselves.”

“Got a signal jammer with me.”

“That—that’s gonna shut me out, too.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

He closed his eyes and breathed. “I’ll be with you as long as I can,” he said.

Once she got inside the building, he steered her away from two patrol rounds, and towards a cleaning supplies closet where she started making a small explosive.

“A really small one,” she reassured him. “And look—” she knocked on something heavy and metallic—“I’m even leaving them a fire extinguisher nearby.”

“Hey, what are you doing—” said someone, male voice, followed by the sound of someone big getting hit in the solar plexus, then the throat, then a few more hits, less distinctive, and finally the sound of someone big hitting the floor, and staying down.

“Thanks for the warning,” Parker said, a little winded.

“Get his gun and tie him up. Not around where you’re going to set off the explosion.”

“Eliot,” she said, once it was done. “You know I’m not going to use the gun.”

“You might have to.”

“I won’t.” A pause. “I have to go now.”

“I know. Keep safe. If—if he’s in bad shape, don’t go doing anything you might regret later.”

 _Leave that to me_ , a part of him wanted to say.

“I won’t. I won't let you either. Not without me.”

He closed his eyes again.

“If I haven’t heard from you in half an hour, I’m going after you.”

“You won’t need to,” she promised. “I’m bringing him home.”

 

Eliot was already downstairs. Hardison and Parker had both cars, so he went straight to his bike.

He'd meet them halfway, or—

He'd meet them halfway.

 

“I’ve got him,” Parker said breathlessly fifteen minutes later. “I’ve got him.” Her voice lowered: “I’ve got you.”

 

They did meet halfway. Eliot practically threw himself off his bike and ran to the car as Hardison slid out the driver seat, rumpled but whole, and obviously well enough not to let Parker drive.  Eliot grabbed him and squeezed him with all his might, or as much of it as Hardison’s skinny body could survive.

“Hey, man, I told you I’d be alright. I had just about conned my way out of there when Parker came to get me.”

“You take me with you, alright?” Eliot said into his neck. “You got that? You pull something stupid like that, you take me with you.”

“You take us,” Parker said quietly.

“Yeah,” he said. All the tension slowly leaked out of him. “I’m sorry.”

Eliot let him go after another minute.

“What was even the job, anyway?”

“Ah, well. About that.”

 

Some priceless historical artefact had gotten stolen a couple of days ago, and Hardison had tracked it down to that particular building. It was close enough—and easy enough to get into—that Hardison had figured he could do it on his own and be back within a couple of hours.

It all would have gone according to plan, except by the time Hardison got to where it was stored, someone else had already made off with it, and tripped the alarm on their way out besides.

 

It was already gone at the next place they tracked it down to, and the next, and the next, and the—

 

“I don’t see why you needed to jump me,” Eliot said as they waited to check-in at the hotel they next followed the artefact to. He slightly readjusted the arm Parker had around his neck but didn’t make any move to dislodge her from his back.

“They need to buy we’re a couple,” she said. He could literally hear her grin.

“We _are_ one,” he grumbled, palming her knee. “Two-thirds of one.”

“A three-people couple,” Hardison piped up from the van.

“A thruple,” Parker said cheerfully.

“Yeah, I ain’t gonna use that word.”

She nuzzled his face.

Eliot manfully put up with the PDA for the rest of the job, but the coffer was empty. Someone had preceded them again.

 

“Are we getting old?” Hardison lamented on the flight back. “Is that it? Are we just obsolete relics of bygone times?”

“Will you stop that? We’re just badly situated, that’s all. By the time we get out of Portland to wherever the thing goes next somebody else’s already had time to grab it and go. Maybe if you didn’t have to rush back to your supercomputer—”

“Hey now, you’re the one who can’t bear to leave the brewery for more than two days—”

“I like having a home,” Parker said. “I like sleeping in our own bed.” 

“Yeah, I mean, yeah,” Eliot stammered, face heating.

Hardison pressed a kiss to the side of her head. “We do too,” he said, his voice unbearably tender.

Eliot had known in that Washington subway with a countdown running out. He had known with Hardison shaking in his arms, fresh out of a grave. He had known when looking at Parker with tears in her eyes had made him consider killing again. He wasn’t sure when it had happened, exactly. When he had forgotten you couldn’t make that kind of promise to more than one person. God, sometimes he remembered seeing Aimee again after all those years, their crew still brand new and clumsy, and he thought even then he might already have—

It had been years since then, years of quiet happiness, but it still blew him away, sometimes. How lucky he was. How much love he still had in him to give. 

 

Hardison was off helping Nate and some of his baby thieves on a job involving a diamond ring—double-digit karats—for Sophie’s birthday. Eliot was stuck in a vent.

They’ve got all of our pictures, the con isn’t going to work, Parker had said at the last minute. Go into the vent, Parker had said. Don’t talk or make any noise the air conditioning unit won’t cover, Parker had said. Just slide forward very slowly until I say stop, Parker had said.

Well, Eliot had been sliding forward very slowly for four hours. He was about ready to beat someone up. He had been ready five minutes in.

“Alright,” Parker said, “my turn. This area’s completely off-limits, so we can just loop the camera feed. Now how do I do that? What would Alec do?”

She got up, got something from the fridge, sat back down, drank something. “Ew,” Parker said. “That orange stuff tastes awful.”

Eliot, who had seen a number of horrible things in his life, but very few as hard to stomach as what Parker had eaten for breakfast just this morning, stayed silent with great difficulty.

“He was sitting here, and drinking that, and he opened that program, and clicked on that, and that, and you were complaining about him taking too long, and he said, ‘where you gonna find yourself a man who can’—wait, where’s Hacking for Dummies?”

Hardison had actually written that on the cover of his notebook of emergency tips—and under the title: Eliot-proof. Parker sometimes read aloud passages of it and giggled to herself.

“Alright,” Parker mumbled to herself after a while, munching on Hardison’s godawful cheese snacks—it was a very distinctive sound—, “I think you’re good to go. Age of the geek, baby.”

“That’s right, but what are you doing on my computer, woman?” came Hardison’s voice.

“Alec!”

“Why’s Eliot in a vent? What’d you use to tap into the camera feed? Well, nevermind all that, looks like the place had a break-in a couple of hours ago, I’m pretty sure we’re already too late.”

Eliot had spent the last four hours crawling through a vent in complete silence. He slowly raised his hand to his ear, and tapped it. When Parker and Hardison quieted down to pay attention, he went on painstakingly spelling out through taps, using their own code: d – a – m – m – i – t – h – a –

 

“Hardison.”

“Yes?”

“What is that.”

“That’s—that’s priceless history right there, is what it is.”

“Are you telling me we’ve been going back and forth across the world ‘cause a bunch of nerds were playing keep-away?”

“A bunch of nerds,” Hardison repeated as he checked over the Iron Man suit. “A bunch of nerds. Now that’s—yeah, alright, that’s fair, probably.”

“We’re giving it back.”

“Eliot, man, come on. This ain’t exactly a robbing the poor kind of situation. They’re not even using it!”

“We’re giving it back.”

“It was in that movie you made me see, wasn’t it, the one I fell asleep during?”

“That’s all of them,” Hardison said in his best despairing accents. He could still remember when Parker couldn’t sleep over because he breathed too loud; he felt almost unbearably happy at every movie explosion she slept through.

“You’re not putting up another geek statue anywhere you want me to live,” Eliot insisted.

He hadn’t liked being met at the door late one night by a tall, armed shadow in the dark. The stormtrooper statue had enjoyed meeting Eliot even less.

“Fine, fine, we’ll give it back.”

“I want one,” Parker said, eyes glittering.

“I mean, I could—Do you want an Iron Man suit? I could make you an Iron Man suit.” Parker turned her sparkly eyes in his direction. “Not—not a _real_ one,” he hurried to say. “I mean, we don’t even have the technology… I _could_ make the technology work,” he mused aloud, trailed off, shook himself off. “But what material would I even use?” His eyes went distant. He shook himself off again. “It would cost a hell of a lot of money… But we _do_ have a hell of a lot of money. Eliot, quick, say something mean and sensible.”

“Would—would you be able to make it fly and everything?” Eliot said instead.

“I mean, we wouldn’t even be able to use it or anything. It’s not like we’d go around blowing people up.”

“I could blow people up,” Parker said.

“No, you couldn’t.”

She made a face that said if she had an Iron Man suit, she damned well could, and would.

“We wouldn’t need to blow up people,” Eliot said, as close to coaxing as he ever got.

“Not even really bad people?”

“We could blow up the safehouses of bad people,” Eliot went on. “That’d be alright.”

“Oh yes, because that’s an every Tuesday kind of situation. You know what? This is the fancy ice cream maker all over again. You just had to have it, didn’t you, and you talked big about how we absolutely needed one, but have you used it twice since we got it? Where’s my ice cream, man?”

“Hey,” Parker called over, having wandered off to peer at the suit. “Let’s find a giant donut to leave it in.”

Hardison loved that woman with all his heart.

“Two minutes ago you wanted to keep this thing, and now you’re arguing against it?” Eliot went on, blatantly avoiding the ice cream issue.

“I wanted the fake one, from the movie, not a _real_ one! That’s how supervillains get made! We go around fighting crime in an armored suit, then criminals start making their own stuff to fight back, and next thing you know you’ve got supervillains on every corner! I ain’t getting into that arms race.”

“Fine,” Eliot said, and then shrugged his _I don’t even care that much_ shrug.

Parker looked at Hardison and made a _Fix this!_ face.

“Here,” he said, “we can—we can get a Batcave, remember that? You know you love Batman.”

“I mean, he’s alright.”

“Don’t give me that! Come on, do the Batman voice.”

“I’m not gonna do the Batman voice.”

Eliot did the Batman voice.

Then Chaos with a capital C messed up in his own break-in and chaos with a lowercase c descended on them all.

 


End file.
